


Spectrum Influence

by lantadyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Species Swap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-23 16:51:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/pseuds/lantadyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes it's easy to forget he's not human. Sometimes it's impossible not to remember.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spectrum Influence

He's used to John giggling and laughing and smiling and talking, so the instant he _snarls_ , Karkat's heart stops dead. Body coiled, that hammer in his hand rock steady even though it must weigh a good fifty pounds, John Egbert bares every single one of his troll fangs and snarls.

The imps don't fall for it. They keep on coming, weapons and stingers and teeth and claws, too many of them to count pressing in on all sides, and if they don't move soon they're going to be fucking overrun.

John growls, the threat thrumming deep in his chest, and it sounds like cicadas and rasping locust song. Something inside him vibrates to a low, whining buzz, and that noise is nothing like human. It's something straight out of his fucking nightmares, and Karkat shivers, his skin prickling. This kid is as far from human as anyone he's ever met, and he hates that he has to keep reminding himself that. He breathes and shifts his fingers on the sickle in his hand, other hand clamped onto his arm as the red red blood soaks down his sleeve and clings sticky and wet to his skin. The cut burns like hot tar and acid, but he's not crying. He's stronger than that. He didn't get through half of SBURB's rampant mindfuckery just to back down against a flesh wound, and Karkat Vantas never needs saving.

"Are you okay?" John asks through his insect's snarl. His eyes jump down to the blood—red human blood—and Karkat has no idea what to make of the look of absolute defiance in his eyes.

"I'm fine. What the fuck do you think I am? I'm not some kind of prissy Catholic schoolgirl who faints at her first Communion when the priest tells her the wine is blood." He scowls over at John, and even now he knows he's being stupid. The imps are right fucking on top of them, and here he is arguing.

But John doesn't comment. He turns back to the imps, his face contorted into some kind of weird concentration as his knuckles turn white around the handle of his hammer. "Good. Watch your back!" And his wings fold out from under the hood of his blue pajamas, long angular grasshopper wings that glisten in the ambient light of bioluminescent mushrooms. He jumps into the air like a grasshopper too, legs coiling and then his entire presence gone in a puff of air, fifty pound hammer and all.

"Shit! A little fucking warning," Karkat yells, whirling to keep an eye on the swatch of imps John had been facing down a second before. They're too close and he swipes, sickle cutting clean through the head of one imp as it erupts into grist and hot oil. Another and another. He cuts them down, gushers piling up around his ankles, and even with all the black sticky carnage, there's still too many for him to get out of this unscathed.

John appears out of nowhere, a rush of razor sharp wind that explodes like a sonic boom as he slams his hammer full force into the ground. Earth buckles, shockwave biting blue ripples into the air that vibrate imps' data strands until they seize and unravel. Before he can even breathe, he's gone again, leaping straight into the air and his wings humming like a helicopter.

It's impressive; a devastating divebomb assault. But Karkat's fought beside John before and this isn't his style. John's style is standing there like a track meet amateur, face still edged with a smile even as he swings that sledgehammer straight into something's face. He's sloppy and up close, twisting the wind to his will as he needs it, and he never loses his goofy demeanor. This is different, and there's something wrong about it.

"What the fuck are you doing? Get down here and help me, Egbert!" he grunts, hand coming away from his arm slick with blood as he stoops and picks up the sickle he'd dropped when the lizard-imp had stabbed him. There's no room to play with John suddenly gone and the imps pressing in closer. This is a two handed assault now. They shred under both of his weapons, scorpion tails lopped off and twitching, tentacles cut to ribbons and carapaces cracked dead, but it's not enough. Something snaps at him and he flinches away before he loses a chunk of his leg, panting against the panic as he kills the thing. With someone at his back there's a chance of winning this without spilling any more player blood—Karkat's blood, sticky and naggingly painful against the gash in his arm—but John abandoned him for somewhere up in the hazy black sky and what the hell is he thinking?

Fuck, Karkat is all by himself here in the middle of this onslaught and with each backward step he takes, the monsters around him are pressing in closer in on all sides.

John lands suddenly, loud as a gunshot and his face still wrapped in a grimace. The hammer hit radiates blue energy through the air, all of it slicing clean through imp after imp and shattering them. He takes out more of them in that one strike than Karkat could in minutes, and then instantly bends to launch himself straight into the air again.

"John! Don't leave me alone down here. I'm not fucking god tier. Help me!"

That gets him to stop. Halfway through the leap he freezes, legs hard like steel and his body flexed, wings shivering expectantly. Karkat cuts another imp in two and John turns instead of jumping, swinging his weapon like an Olympic hammer throw competition without letting go. "I've never seen you bleed so much at once before, okay?" he yells as if that explains everything, panting a little and his eyes stupidly frustrated as he chances a look at Karkat. "It's so red. I know you said it was red, but jeez! It's as red as Dave's text is!"

"No shit. What the fuck does that have to do with _anything_?"

"I don't know!" He turns and slams his hammer into the ground again, the waves of energy weaker when he's not launching himself from the heavens, but still strong enough to destroy more imps. "It's just _wrong_ , okay. I hate it. I see that color and something inside me is telling me to _cut you up_ into tiny little bits and _set you on fire!_ "

Whoa. Holy shit. Karkat backsteps and stares over one shoulder at John. "What in the everloving _fuck?_ " he snaps, and it comes out more spooked than he'd intended. This is John Egbert talking, and hearing that kind of murder in the idiot's voice is enough to throw the whole universe off kilter for a second.

"Trolls don't have blood that color, okay? It's _bad_. I've never felt like this before, but it's a bad color and seeing it makes me want to _kill_ whatever it's coming out of." His knuckles are clamped white around the handle of his hammer, eyes latched onto Karkat's and his knees locked against what his genetic instincts are telling him to do. What he's utterly determined not to do, because they're entirely different species, they're friends, and in this case his genes are completely fucking wrong. But it's hard, really hard, and Karkat can see it in the stiffness in John's posture, in the nervous flutter of his wings and the angry, deadset snarl on his face.

"You guys are severely fucked up as a species," Karkat mutters, eyes watching John. Eyes he needs to be using to watch his back, imps pressing in from all sides and neither of them attacking as John lays out this golden little piece of crosscultural dumbfuckery. It feels dangerous ripping his gaze away from John and back to the boiling mob of imps behind him, but he does it. Fuck, they're close; black shiny carapaces and teeth everywhere, and Karkat chooses to step backward instead of pressing forward dangerously into their assault. He sets his back to John's instead—trusting him despite the homicide in his alien genes. John's wings flutter against the back of his shirt and both of them breathe in scared gulps.

"Try not to murder me, okay?"

John laughs awkwardly through his growl, alien parts rattling in his chest. "No, I'm definitely not going to murder you," he says, grimacing. "Let's get through this too, though."

He slams his hammer down on an imp, shattering the five next to it with the shockwaves. They're running lower on backups now. There's light at the end of this fucking screaming death mob. Karkat shifts his fingers on his weapons, the wood handles slick with his blood and the black oily film the imps bleed, and he cuts a tall thing with mantis claws in half. "As long as you don't ditch me, we've got this. Try to keep your fucking goldfish of an attention span intact for once and ignore the red."

John stiffens behind him, every muscle in his body going rigid. He smashes something, steps forward, steps back, and even though Karkat is up to his eyeballs in concentrating on fighting, he knows something's wrong. The growl bubbles out of the troll again, a sound like a five-foot murderous cicada, and the hair stands up along the back of Karkat's neck.

"I can't—"

John's wings fire up loud like a weedwhipper, the wind swirling as Karkat hears him to shoot up into the stratosphere again to come crashing down. He's gone. Anything to keep that red red of Karkat's blood out of his mind for a few seconds. Anything to not have to think about it. And that would be fine if they hadn't spent the last few seconds arguing instead of attacking outright. Now the imps are pressing in even closer, claws twitching out to rake dangerously against Karkat's pant legs, their teeth snapping shut inches away, and his control on the panic is fraying. They're so close to biting into him again, teeth and claws and spines and needles all charged with the poison of Vriska's stupid dead pet scorpion, and the pain throbbing like acid through his shoulder is enough to terrify him. His heart is hammering, hands shaking a little and his breath coming in gasps, and in his head he can see them biting into his soft flesh and spreading his red human blood all over the mushrooms.

Shit. Oh shit, where is John—?

He whirls and cuts down some of them. Not enough of them. Never enough of them when he's fighting by himself, when there's always more of them boiling out of the woodwork to overrun him and test him and work him to his very breaking point and beyond because that's what this fucking game does. It wants him alone and broken, and his eyes are wide and scared as he takes a step back from the toothy beaked maw of something that's half squid and half nightmare.

"Watch out!"

John yells and it doesn't work itself through Karkat's head until there's tentacles wrapped around his ankles. The hammer burns like a blue meteor, rocketing down bright as a sunspot as John swings, the troll suddenly above the battleground with his wings blurring as he smashes his weapon straight into the squid's face. It detonates. Blue shockwaves go everywhere, rattling Karkat's teeth and his bones and the imps around his ankles evaporating into data in the backwash. He goes down on his ass, hip deep in fruit gushers and black oil imp blood, and when the light ebbs away most of the imps are gone.

Most but not all, because John is on the ground—buffeted out of his aerial attack by the shockwaves—and he's yelping, kneeling in the grist litter and twisting around to try to pull an imp off his back. It has fangs like a demon, eight red eyes flashing and dangerous as it bites down, settling its teeth farther into the delicate joint that connects John's god tier grasshopper wings to his scrawny grey back.

"Oh god, get it off!" he wails, one hand wrapped around the imp's leg and pulling because his hammer is useless here. "Karkat!"

"Coming!"

The thing evaporates into data as Karkat sinks his sickle into it, and John's entire body is coiled to spring. The blood wells up thick and opaque like blue acrylic paint, licking into the fabric of his hoodie and down the pretty latticework veins of his wing. It's already coagulating, troll biology kicked into healing overdrive by millennia of constant aggressive fighting and a culture wrapped in death. Karkat grabs a handful of blue cloth and presses it into the wound.

"Ow! Damnit!"

"Shut up, Egbert," he growls, sinking down on his haunches next to the other boy, looking him over to see if he's got anything else carved out of him. "You must be a fucking grandmaster dumbass to blow up half of LOWAS and still somehow manage to get your wing nearly bitten off." There's his own blood all over his hands—red translucence smeared with that weird opaque blue—and John looks over at the two colors with his face set against the orders in his genes, but a lot more of his annoyingly happy personality back too.

"Come on, Karkat, you totally choked there at the end! Did an imp bite you again or something?"

"What? No! I'm not worthless in battle and I could have taken those assholes on my own if I'd just had a little breathing room. Instead you go moaning on about my blood and shit to distract me and then disappear up into the fucking clouds? Great plan there, Sherlock."

He laughs a little, the smile edging over his ridiculous teeth again. "I don't think I know that reference yet!" A shrug, then, "Sorry, though. I needed to clear my head. I think I'm better now."

"You were almost too late, asshole."

"I said sorry."

"You don't want cut me up and bury the pieces in your basement anymore?" It's a little disturbing thinking of someone as giggly and normal as John digging graves in his basement for his dismembered victims. And Karkat hates how even here, even with the troll's freaky alien blood all over his hands, he still has to keep reminding himself that John isn't human.

He shrugs, one grey hand wrapping around the red blood on Karkat's arm and squeezing to put pressure on the wound. He smiles. "I kind of do, but I think I'd really rather pity you instead."

Pity. Again with the weird alien pity flirting, but for once Karkat just lets it go and sits down. He leans his forehead against John's shoulder and breathes, glad that the danger is gone and that even if they are both bleeding, at least they're both okay.


End file.
